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From the official grpc benchmark, it seems the performance of the C++ implementation has gone down since 2023. https://grafana-dot-grpc-testing.appspot.com/?from=now-5y&to=now

I'm talking about greater than 5 TB in size. Rclone looks really good because I can just give it a bandwidth limit, point it at google drive and fire and forget. But I'm curious if that is the best way to do this? What does HN think?

Quantum computers haven't even factored a three-digit number yet, right? I don't have handy the equivalent in discrete log solution, but... even if somehow (??!) they gain the 4+ orders of magnitude for Shor's space computation, there remain major unsolved boring problems like error correction and cooling, right?

Or have there been some galaxy-shaking developments in QC that actually make this somehow plausible?

Some recent, relevant, major discussions I brushed-up on before posting this:

* Willow announcement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42367649

* Majorana 1 announcement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43104071

* OpenSSH statement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44863242

* The case against Google's claims of "quantum supremacy": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42384768

edit: I do want to say, I like Vitalik a lot and I think he has a beautiful and friendly brain and heart; the few times I hung with him he has been cool as heck. This is not an anti-Vitalik post. More of a "where are we really in QC" post, which I figure some people here can summarize in fairly simple terms.

In my experience even the best software projects have a few skeletons in their closet, blemishes on an otherwise well-built project.

At the end of the day, we all have to build things that simply work and provide business value. Striving for perfect code is not the goal. But it does make me wonder: does perfect software even exist? If not, what's the gold standard?

Maybe an ignorant question but just wondering why someone hasn’t already done this if they are concerned about people not properly being held accountable.

I went to see my Cursor (the AI IDE) analytics and clicked a banner advertising their new company-level analytics dashboard. It now has a section “AI Edits by repository” that includes all the repositories used with Cursor, including your personal side projects. [0] I suspect they scrape the name of the repository from the list of GIT remotes, without explicit consent or notice.

If you're using Cursor with a company (teams, enterprise) subscription, information of all your code commits is sent to their API. This telemetry cannot be disabled and is available in a highly granular format in their API. [1]

The dashboard includes also includes information on when you were writing code. [2] The data is available in a highly granular format in their API. [3]

[0]: https://cursor.com/docs/account/teams/analytics#repository-insights [1]: https://cursor.com/docs/account/teams/ai-code-tracking-api#get-ai-commit-metrics-json-paginated [2] https://cursor.com/docs/account/teams/analytics#daily-usage [3] https://cursor.com/docs/account/teams/ai-code-tracking-api#get-ai-code-change-metrics-json-paginated

I'm honestly shocked at how bad the current Facebook interface has become. I’m trying to delete a Page I own, and the platform basically makes it impossible. The options have moved or disappeared, the Page Settings menu leads to the wrong profile, Business Suite doesn’t show the Page, and the “Access and Control” section doesn’t list it at all.

Facebook keeps bouncing me between: – personal profile settings – business portfolio settings – Meta Business Suite – classic Page UI

None of them give the actual option to delete the Page. It’s like the platform actively hides the feature.

And here’s the worst part: I AM the admin. I can publish on the Page. I can edit it. I can manage everything… except delete it.

I get that Meta wants to keep pages alive for engagement and ad data, but blocking users from removing something they own is straight-up abusive UX. No user should have to waste hours navigating four different interfaces to do something basic like “delete a page.”

If anyone has figured out the REAL way to delete a Page in 2025 with the new Facebook UI (which keeps changing), please share. Meta’s documentation is outdated, and their support is nonexistent.

This shouldn’t be this hard.

I've been an "IC" for aages. Now with agentic AI, I basically am the orchestrator, approver, scheduler, big picture planner. I very rarely dive into the code in the weeds now, despite doing that full time for 10+ years (and having programmed as a hobby for 2 decades before that).

I Can get so much more done. I can approach things I wouldn't have taken on before because my natural limitations would have taken me so much longer to overcome. It's changed the entire way I exist. I have more time to think about the big picture things, not just in work, but in life. I feel more like myself, because I get to be in touch with how I actually feel more of the time, rather than having my head in that pure creative flow space. I still get into that, but it's for the planning, orchestation, rarely the code, or it's for something else unrelated to work.

I love the AI revolution. The biggest thing it's given me is time. I can literally move 100 to 200 times faster with current SOTA agentic tools, in my estimation. I feel like I'm "managing" a bunch of high performing, focused, energetic ICs. It can literally turn regular people into their own little labs. I love the AI revolution. It is so cool.

Anyone else feel this way, or can relate, or want to share their own positive experiences?

Lately, I’ve noticed a new trend on X: Devs (and indie hackers in particular) are ditching cloud providers and jumping straight to bare-metal servers like Hetzner.

Honestly, I think the big cloud companies just haven’t kept up. Their services feel clunky compared to the standalone alternatives. Just try comparing Vercel’s dev experience to Amplify’s, and you’ll see what I mean. On top of that, AWS has gotten way stingier with startup credits.

Put those two together, and it’s no surprise fewer people are hosting their MVPs on AWS. It’s tough to stay under $150/month with a database and a server, while on bare metal you can grab 16 GB RAM for around $20/month.

- Do you think the cloud is actually losing ground? - And for those using bare-metal: how do you handle DB backups, CI/CD, and pulling logs? - Would you scale something using bare-metal servers?

[Carlos](https://github.com/clostao)

I'm doing some research on how teams think about older codebases, and I'd love everyone's take on this. No wrong answers, just trying to understand how different teams or organizations define this.

Thank you in advance!

I mean ffs, code refactoring that took 1m30 before is now at 5m / 8m at each question.

We’re experimenting with an architecture for automated adjudication that doesn’t rely on rule bases or statistical prediction. Instead of encoding law as “if–else” rules or training a model on past cases, we model abstract legal reasoning as a meta-algorithm: a control layer that orchestrates several heterogeneous components — hard-coded logic, numerical modeling, and structured natural-language procedures executed by an LLM.

The core idea is that the structure of legal reasoning (which stages to run, how to select and interpret norms, how to balance competing interests, when to revise earlier conclusions) is expressed in a strongly typed pseudocode / meta-language. Some parts of this meta-algorithm are implemented directly in code (procedural checks, basic qualification, graph updates), some are mathematical (utilities, equilibria, fuzzy uncertainty), and some are written as high-level instructions in natural language, which the LLM interprets under tight constraints. In that setting, the LLM is not a predictor of outcomes but an interpreter of a given procedural script.

The system doesn’t train on case law and doesn’t try to “predict” courts. It reconstructs the reasoning pipeline itself: from extracting the parties’ factual narratives and evidence structure, through norm selection and weighting, up to generating a decision that can be traced back step-by-step in the internal graph of operations. The same meta-algorithm can work with different jurisdictions by swapping norm packages; we’ve tested it so far on a set of international and domestic disputes.

There is an early public demo here: https://portal.judgeai.space/

If you upload a small statement of claim and a response, the engine runs the full pipeline and outputs a structured decision document.

We’d be grateful for feedback from people working on hybrid symbolic/semantic systems, “LLM as interpreter” architectures, or formal models of complex decision-making. Obvious open questions for us are: how best to test failure modes of this kind of meta-control, what formal tools to use for checking consistency of the reasoning graph, and how far one can push this approach before hitting hard theoretical limits.

This is one of the recent ones that I came across - https://x.com/ycombinator/status/1988366241460089118

Of late it looks like I've been noticing more of such pointless businesses and I'm not alone. What do you think?

AI is transforming Database Systems. Perhaps the biggest impact so far has been natural language to query language translations, or Text-to-SQL. However, another massive innovation is brewing.

AI presents new Semantic Operators for our query languages. For example, we are all familiar with the WHERE filter. Now we have AI_WHERE, in which an LLM, or another AI model, computes the filter value without needing it to already be available in the database!

```sql SELECT * FROM podcasts AI_WHERE “Text-to-SQL” in topics ```

Semantic Filters are just the tip of iceberg, the roster of Semantic Operators further includes Semantic Joins, Map, Rank, Classify, Groupby, and Aggregation!

And it doesn’t stop there! One of the core ideas for Relational Algebra and how its influenced Database Systems is query planning and finding the optimal order to apply filters. For example, let’s say you have two filters, the car is red and the car is a BMW. Now let’s say the dataset only contains 100 BMWs, but 50,000 red cars!! Applying the BMW filter first will limit the size of the set for the next filter!

This foundational idea has all sorts of extensions now that LLMs are involved! This opportunity is giving rise to new query engines and declarative optimizers such as Palimpzest, LOTUS, and others!

I am SUPER EXCITED to publish the 131st episode of the Weaviate Podcast with Matthew Russo, a Ph.D. student at MIT!

So many interesting nuggets in this podcast, loved discussing these things with Matthew, and I hope you find it interesting!

YouTube: https://youtu.be/koPBr9W4qU0

Spotify: https://spotifycreators-web.app.link/e/ddUhVMmLoYb

Medium: https://medium.com/@connorshorten300/semantic-query-engines-with-matthew-russo-weaviate-podcast-131-131a42bbc521

I’ve been working on a stateless compliance and validation engine that runs across multiple chains (Ethereum, XRPL, Hedera, Polygon, Stellar, Bitcoin). Everything is processed per-request — no customer records, no logs, no storage. Just deterministic validation.

What it currently does • Wallet + transaction checks (multi-chain) • AML, basic KYC logic, RWA attestation structure • Zero-knowledge proof validation framework • ISO 20022 XML generation (pacs.008, pain.001) • Basic cross-border rules engine • AI/ML advisory layer (optional — model loads from S3 and runs at inference time, no data retention)

Infrastructure • Fully serverless: API Gateway + Lambda • 6 chain validators • 6 compliance modules • Sandbox + production environments • Stateless by design (no PII, no telemetry tracking unless user enables it)

Live Demo • MVP validator: https://mvp.zkorigoplus.com (simple UI showing chain + compliance outputs) • API documentation: https://zkorigoplus.com

What I’m looking for Not trying to sell anything — just want feedback from engineers who’ve built compliance, payments, or chain infrastructure before.

Main questions: 1. Does the stateless approach make sense long-term? 2. Any obvious gaps in the architecture? 3. Is the multi-chain abstraction too broad or reasonable? 4. Should the AI advisory stay optional or be removed entirely?

Happy to share more details if helpful.

Watching DALnet get almost completely destroyed by sustained DDoS attacks around 2002 was a formative memory for me, but I never did figure out why it happened, or what made DALnet more vulnerable than other IRC networks. Many of the simple explanations (warez? extortion? demo of botnet-for-hire?) don't really seem likely, and don't fit the facts.

Does anyone know what the story really was?

This past Friday afternoon, a member in our Discord server reported a phishing email pointing to a fake login page.

We took up to research it and because of clumsy decisions by the attacker we got their GitHub and their operational Telegram bot.

Screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/FTy4mrH

Sometimes the attacker incompetence can be a defender's best weapon ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The phishing page was a standard clone of an "email", unbranded anf generic service. A bit of gobuster reconnaissance and we got the site's .git directory publicly accessible and listing its contents.

Inspecting of the requests also got us the first Telegram bot token. This is the digital equivalent of leaving the blueprints to your entire operation, including past versions and deleted files, lying on the front lawn.

We pulled the repository, found automated deployments and multiple fake pages with different hardcoded Telegram bot tokens and Chat IDs.

With the source code, repo and the active Telegram bot token, we filed detailed abuse reports:

- GitHub: We reported the repository containing the phishing kit's source code. It was taken down for violating TOS.

- Telegram: We reported the bot using the provided token and chat ID, leading to its removal.

- Hosting Provider: The malicious site was reported and taken offline.

Lesson learned? Never deploy a .git folder to production. Even if you are a criminal.

Acknowledgement: This was a collaborative effort by members of the BeyondMachines Discord community. The crowdsourced speed and collaboration helped us take this down very fast.

Found out from my server logs.

One big problem I have with pomodoro apps: they disappear. Even when the timer's running, I forget about it.

So I built a macOS app that runs as a persistent, always-on-top sidebar. When you collapse it, it becomes a 3px colored progress bar.

That constant visual reminder helps my time-blindedness stay on track.

Curious if anyone else struggles with the same thing.

literal shower-thought i had tonight as i was thinking about how at work we all don't like dealing with our helm charts because the syntax and structure ends up looking so ugly and it just feels wrong (not to mention the multiple different approaches of handling kubernetes resources in multiple different pipelines.

i try to see beyond any initial repulsion to weird looking code because i know that it may be super functional. but it got me thinking: what makes code beautiful? what makes code "high quality"? (other than that it results in a working, performant, and robust software program obviously).

so i'm curious -- can you show me the best code you've encountered? it can be a small snippet or it can be a "slice of a library" or an architecture etc. have you written anything yourself that you are super proud of?

I’m Rayyan Abrar, Managing Partner at a small engineering team. I’m curious how founders handle sudden spikes in development work.

- Do you hire contractors, agencies, or full-time engineers? - How do you balance speed vs. code quality? - Any lessons learned or pitfalls to avoid?

I’d love to hear what has worked for you.

The "new" page with dead articles shown has about 5 submissions per page with Indonesian titles and spam contents usually containing a phone number.

Sometimes they're posted by brand-new accounts, sometimes it's "aged" accounts that have never posted before. For instance, this one created in 2021 has posted 12 times in the last 2 hours:

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=TheDarkLegend

(you'll need to have showdead turned on)

Is this the world's most misguided phishing attempt? AFAIK dead posts don't get picked up by any search engines etc...

Curious whether AI tooling are making engineers more productive with more free time or more productive with even less free time.

I was recently laid off at a big tech company after 10 years. And now I am facing the harsh reality of trying to crack leetcode medium/hard problems (something I never managed to do routinely while I was working at this company). Is anyone here in a similar situation or has been in one? If so, how do you keep yourself motivated to solve multiple problems a day, especially knowing you are actually never going to work on such problems as part of an actual job?

Edit: I need to practice leetcode because the interview process for almost every software engineering role (especially in the Bay Area) seems to require going through at least one round of coding challenge based on leetcode medium/hard problem. I did not call it out earlier because I thought this is a very obvious point. Perhaps, I should have clarified that I am mostly targeting software engg roles.

Race condition, producer consumer, and cool stuffs like that? I do java

I keep finding myself commenting on threads and then forgetting to check back. HN doesn’t have built in notifications, so I’m curious how people here actually keep track of discussions they are part of.

What’s the best workflow you’ve found to follow active conversations without missing replies?

I am a software engineer with about 20 years of experience, and lately I have felt a bit lost about what to do going forward.

For the context, I have always been passionate about software engineering, I started very young and have worked in it non stop every since. I mostly worked broadly in web development and have pretty-much mastered all areas and layers of the stack (infra and cloud, databases, backend, network, front-end and even a bit of mobile...). I've also been an indie game dev on my free time ever since.

For the last 5~10 years I have not been evolving or learning anymore in my daily job, and feel that I've basically seen everything. It only feels repetitive, and as I've lived through many tech bubbles, I don't get much interested in the major trends because the fundamentals are the same and everything old gets new again.

Over the years, I've worked in many companies, from big ones to fresh startups, B2B and B2C, in direct and as a contractor as well as web dev agencies. I've also found out that while I like tech leading and the various design and spec phases of software, I don't like managing people. I do not want to evolve as a CTO either because of those reasons and the endless meetings. But the industry seems to think that the normal path forward is to quit being a developer and manage people instead, which is a totally alien idea to me because it involves completely different skills and knowledge.

I am now at a step in my career where I find it impossible to find a company where my knowledge and experience is really valued and useful. I'm often the most senior, more than even the managers and CTOs, but have less power or influence and am just another cog in the machine. I see the mistakes being made and know what it will cost (because I've been there and done that many times), I do my best to explain that and recommend alternatives, but more often than not it still happens anyway.

I've long considered switching to game dev professionally since I find that it has a lot more fun and interesting challenge, and I yet have lots of things to learn there. But as a husband and a dad, the reputation of the industry (low salary and crunch time) makes it difficult to seriously consider. I'm now thinking that freelancing my be my best bet going forward, and then explore and build things from here.

I know that there are more senior (30, 40+ years...) people around here, so I'm curious to hear your experiences. Did you ever feel the same way, what did you do and how did you finally find a satisfying daily job?